Technology management and strategy composition: innovation of IC foundry

The goals of this research are two-tiered: The first goal is to analyze the evaluation criteria used by integrated circuit (IC) designers when selecting foundry service providers. The second goal is to use an in-depth case study on the global IC foundry leader, TSMC, to explore the strategic compositions of IC foundry’s process development, since the process technology has been found, through our survey at the prior stage, to be the most significant evaluation criterion in view of competitiveness in the customer market. As a result, for the foundry industry, technology no longer counts for everything, although it is a priority; coordinated strategies, in contrast, should assure more business merits for all concerned. This study has drawn the strategy matrix with eight categories of IC foundry process strategies.